My favorite writer
I had the opportunity this month to pay tribute to my very favorite writer, the science fiction master John Varley, in Discourse. His birthday is in August, and August also marked the 50th anniversary of his first publication, so I spent a little time examining his career and some of the elements that make his work so special: his hippie-style individualism and the smooth, precise style of his prose. Here’s an excerpt:
Varley’s fiction is marked by radical inventiveness, yet the qualities that make his work truly extraordinary are the smoothness of his prose and the realism of his characters. Together, these suspend the reader’s disbelief even through the strangest premises, in a manner that indeed resembles Heinlein, but without Heinlein’s distracting penchant for preaching about his political and social fixations. Actually, Varley’s writing more resembles that of hard-boiled detective writers like Donald Westlake….
Varley’s trademarks [are] independent, clever characters guided by common sense instead of conformity, and more likely to build rockets in their garages than to complain about others not doing so. Above all, his characters often see exploring the unknown not just as an adventure, but as a path to the authentic, individual life—one that won’t be clean or easy, but will be earned, and therefore genuine, in a way that can never be true of the unexamined life that computerized mass production makes so cheap. It’s a theme that would have been familiar to Emerson, who wrote: “The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle.”
Incidentally, I mention in the article that Varley’s work has almost never reflected the “tune in, turn on, drop out” aspect of the hippie tradition, and I didn’t expand on what I mean by almost. The truth is that there actually is one story of his that very much originates in that element of the counterculture—and because there’s only the one, you might be tempted to disregard it, except that it’s his most celebrated story, “The Persistence of Vision,” which not only won him both the Hugo and the Nebula, but which Varley calls his own personal favorite.
“Persistence” is about a wanderer who happens upon a commune of blind and deaf people. He finds that they’ve reached a transcendental state of collective consciousness, and it ends with him being magically transformed into one of them. After the story won the Nebula, the late Thomas Disch denounced it for what he viewed as a kind of “fan service” (a term that didn’t exist back then), and later satirized it in a poem called “On Science Fiction.” He later explained that
The poem deals with the fact that [one] emotional characteristic of much of the science fiction audience is the desire for a kind of fantasy, the emotional substructure and subtext of which is remarkably akin to the emotional needs of invalids, of people who have been physically crushed by life and who consequently feel different. Because their experiences are different. I characterized this invalidism as being one of clubbishness, a certain “Let’s all cuddle together,” the ghetto mentality in science fiction, the feeling that you can make a pact against the bad guys out there. It’s a very common human feeling, but one that’s intensified among invalids as among children because of their consciousness of total dependency vis-à-vis adult or beneficent authority, and one’s resentment towards that outer world, which is usually represented in ill-concealed fantasies of the worm turning, and the cripples being able to beat hell out of the lucky whole people of the world.
Much as I adore Varley’s work, I have to agree with Disch here. “Persistence” is not only not Varley’s best writing, but at its core it’s actually contrary to the spirit of his best writing, which has always been (a) anti-utopian and (b) focused on engaging and confronting nature—not on either strongman fantasies (as in the worst of Heinlein) or weakman fantasies, such as “Persistence” offers, and which one encounters in certain “fan-service” societies including, I’m sorry to say, practically the entire NuTrek world. You need only hang around fans of the post-J.J. Abrams Star Trek franchise for a few minutes to know what Disch is getting at when he speaks of “liv[ing] / Completely in the imagination, never to leave it. / To live, that is, imprisoned in a wheelchair, / In limbs that can no longer suffer pains / Of growth.”
In a fantastic recent essay in Think, the poet and science fiction aficionado Frederick Turner contrasts today’s literature, which is overwhelmingly focused on “protest, complaint, and revenge,” with literature that seeks to “add new worlds to the old”—that’s forward-looking rather than corrective or vengeful or indignant. This contrast seems to map quite well onto what Disch was saying, though without the bitter quality Disch added. In much of the science fiction world, and practically all of Star Trek, the spirit of finding and creating something new has been entirely neglected in favor of “cuddling together”: focusing on “healing” wounds, be they real, imagined, or manufactured. There’s certainly an important role for the latter type of literature. But to remain stuck in that mode is to abandon the more important goal of discovery and invention. Literature, whether science fiction or any other, should comfort the insiders, to some extent—but it will spiral inward and destroy itself if it doesn’t also focus on the outside. When that happens on a miniature scale, within a “franchise,” it results in the pretend-games of “fan service.” When it happens on a large scale, it results in the withering of a culture.
As for “Persistence,” the hippie ethos always embodied a tension, or an unsustainable compromise, between individualism and collectivism—as at Woodstock, where everybody was “doing his own thing” in exactly the same way at the same time. And that tension is reflected in Varley’s own work, most notably in the contrast between the valorization of oblivion that lies at the heart of “Persistence” and the celebration of realism, pluck, and freedom that animates his true masterpieces, such as Steel Beach or the Gaea trilogy. To my mind, this is not a knock against Varley’s work at all; the tension only adds to the richness of his literary output. While neither Disch nor I may like “Persistence” as literature, or approve of it as social philosophy, it’s an important contrast to have, when evaluating the history of New Wave science fiction. To not include it would be like leaving Woodstock and LSD out of a history of the sixties.
Remembering Jacob Bronowski
Speaking of favorite writers, the BBC commemorated the 50th anniversary of Jacob Bronowski’s death with a radio program that reflected on him and on his late daughter Lisa’s work toward a biography of him (which, alas, she didn’t manage to finish).
I must say that I’ve always disagreed with Ralph Desmarais’s view that Bronowski concealed the nature of his wartime work (planning the bombing of Japan). In fact, we don’t know how much he was at liberty to reveal; he had signed the Official Secrets Act during the war, of course. And I’ve never seen any evidence of deception on his part. In fact, he said in his book William Blake and the Age of Revolution that he had been working on “tasks of destruction” during the war, and his wife Rita openly told me in about 2000 that he’d worked on planning bombing raids.
As for the radio show’s discussion of Bruno being blacklisted as a Communist, do keep in mind that his mother and his sister were literally card-carrying members of the Communist Party; his mother held CP meetings in her living room in the thirties, and in 1939, was raising money for the volunteers fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—largely a CP enterprise—and in the 1950s, Bruno publicly defended Klaus Fuchs. So it wasn’t just some arbitrary prejudice that got him accused of being a Communist. In fact, he wasn’t a Communist—he wasn’t even a Marxist—but it’s understandable why people would think he was.
I’ll add that it was an immense pleasure to write my Bronowski book. I learned more from working on it than on anything else I’ve ever done. One thing it taught me was how difficult, and yet how imperative, it is to remain objective about the past.
Reagan
The Goldwater Institute hosted a premiere of the new film Reagan on Friday. It was enjoyable; although not particularly well written, it features solid performances by Dennis Quaid and John Voigt, and captures quite well Reagan’s most praiseworthy attribute: his insistence on the immorality and injustice of communism. Check it out!
The bat cave
A couple weeks ago, we went to see the Phoenix bat cave—yes, Phoenix has a bat cave, up in Arcadia—which is home to as many as 20,000 bats. Just after sunset they emerge to start their bug-catching, and it’s a delight to see (even if they fly so fast it’s hard to spot them):
No, Bruce Wayne did not introduce himself.
Frederick Douglass and classical liberalism
Liberty Fund is hosting an online discussion about libertarianism and black history, with a lead essay by Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher. My contribution looks at libertarianism in the work of Frederick Douglass. There’ll be further contributions in the coming days, so keep an eye on their site.
The Song of the New World
I spoke at Level Up this year about Antonin Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, titled “From the New World.” I enjoyed exploring both the background of this classic piece of music and the effect it’s had on people through the years, including everyone from author Willa Cather to astronaut Neil Armstrong. You can watch the presentation here:
And you can read the written version, which contains a good deal more detail, here. Excerpt:
Willa Cather’s generation had emerged from the poverty and drudgery of farm life. They had been brought to the threshold of liberty by immigrant parents or enslaved grandparents, and now, in the 1890s, they witnessed not just economic growth, but the birth of an essentially brand-new civilization—things humanity had never experienced before: electric light, motion pictures, skyscrapers. Steel production increased by a factor of five hundred in their lifetimes; the amount of railroad track quadrupled; farm output doubled. This was the moment when what Columbus had called the “New World” produced upon the Earth something genuinely new: a society where the infinite potential within each person could be unleashed to irrigate the deserts, fertilize the plains, cure the diseases, and construct the machinery to liberate mankind from the toil under which every one of our ancestors labored. Louis Sullivan, architect of the Auditorium Building, said that this was the instant “when the golden hour tolled, all mists departed, and there shone forth a vision, the reality of MAN, as Free Spirit, as Creator, as Container of illimitable powers, for the joy and peace of mankind.” Ninth Symphony was the sound of that golden hour.
The future of liberalism: secular or religious?
Also at Level Up, I participated in a panel with David Wolpe, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Craig Biddle entitled “The Future of Liberalism: Religious or Secular?” Ostensibly it was about whether political liberalism (in the broad sense of that term) can be maintained on a secular basis or whether it needs religion to sustain it. But our conversation varied far from that bullseye and ended up on some classic arguments for an against the existence of God, and whether one can have spirituality without supernaturalism. The conversation wasn’t as disciplined as I would’ve preferred—but the audience seems to have really enjoyed it. You can watch here:
Obviously my perspective affects how I see this, but: I do think it was pretty obvious that both Wolpe and Hirsi Ali resorted to a variety of devices to evade logic and to substitute words for arguments. Wolpe’s definition of “faith,” for example, was so incredibly vague as to be effectively meaningless, and he frequently resorted to horse laugh, sneering, and other logical fallacies. Hirsi Ali did not dispute—but in fact conceded—that her newfound religious belief, such as it is, is a matter of “subjective choice” on her part (which seems blasphemous to me), rather than anything Christianity has traditionally recognized as a legitimate adherence to the faith. (One does not choose to believe; that would be prideful.) And nobody tried to answer my point about the Second Commandment.
But the point I hope really came home was that both, and especially Hirsi Ali, are reacting against the element within the atheist community that is effectively nihilistic—that offers no positive philosophical teaching about values. And on that point, we all emphatically agreed. The Objectivist community has said all along that the biggest problem with the “New Atheism” is that it offers only arguments against wrong ideas, but has never proposed convincing arguments in favor of good ideas. Because Wolpe and Hirsi Ali are unfamiliar with rational arguments for morality and flourishing, they assume it’s a choice between dogma and nihilism, and that’s just not true.
Contracts and price controls
I joined my friends Armstrong & Getty a couple weeks ago to talk about the remarkable story about a lawsuit against Disney, in which Disney claimed that the plaintiff was required to go to arbitration, because he agreed to arbitration when he clicked the “terms of service” on Disney+…even though his lawsuit has nothing to do with Disney+, but involves one of their amusement parks. Disney+ rather quickly dropped that argument, but it’s a really fascinating question about contracts and arbitration—
…but then we couldn’t help getting into other things, like why price controls are stupid. You can listen here.
What’s going on at work?
It’s been an extraordinarily busy month at the Goldwater Institute. We won a crucial victory at the Arizona Supreme Court against government subsidies to public-sector unions. We won a victory in the Court of Appeals against a misleading ballot initiative. We won a case at the Ninth Circuit, opposing mandatory bar associations. We filed briefs in an Indian Child Welfare Act case we’re litigating in Minnesota, and in a case in California challenging restrictions on telemedicine, and in a U.S. Supreme Court case challenging restrictions on the right of workers to leave their union…and a bunch of other stuff. Remember to read the Institute’s blog for regular updates.
Poems at Medusa’s Kitchen
I recently had a group of poems published in Medusa’s Kitchen, one of the main poetry venues for Sacramento-area writers, of whom I used to be one. The poems are more or less on the theme of Venus.
In “Winter Sestina,” I borrow from, among others, the poems of Dylan Thomas and the lyrics of “Autumn Leaves.”
Falling again
Fall sure seems to have come awfully quick. But it’s the best season, so…here’s Red Garland playing “Autumn Leaves.”